ANITA BJÖRK (born 1923). Swedish actress, acclaimed for her role as the vivaciously seductive heroine in the film of Miss Julie (1951), directed by Alf Sjöberg. After her husband’s suicide, Greene was her lover in the 1950s.
MARJORIE BOWEN (pseudonym of G. M. V. Campbell, 1886–1952). Prolific writer of historical novels and children’s stories. In ‘The Lost Childhood’, Greene claims that when (around the age of fourteen) he read her novel The Viper of Milan (1906), it inspired him to become a fiction-writer. ‘It was as if I had been supplied once and for all with a subject.’ This story of double treachery taught him that ‘human nature is not black and white but black and grey.’; and its echoes can be found extensively in Greene’s work. The betrayed betrayer is a recurrent character. (Eventually, Travels with My Aunt would jocularly feature a character called Visconti, described as a ‘viper’.)
ROBERT BROWNING (1812–89). Greene admired his poetry, particularly its portrayals of devious, ruthless, ambiguous and sensual characters. ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ contains a passage about ‘the dangerous edge’ (commending duplicity and ambiguity) which, Greene said, could serve as the epigraph for all his novels, and offers the notion that ‘faith means perpetual unbelief.
LIONEL CARTER (1904–71). Greene, tormented by Carter at Berkhamsted School, associated him with Visconti in The Viper of Milan, ‘with his beauty, his patience, and his genius for evil’. (See ‘The Lost Childhood’.) The schoolday tormentor is fictionalised as ‘Webber’ in ‘Prologue to Pilgrimage’: see Life I, pp. 74–81.
FIDEL CASTRO (born 1926). Marxist dictator of Cuba who gained power in 1959 by overthrowing the corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista. Greene met and admired him: see ‘The Marxist Heretic’ (CE), and ‘Lines on the Liberation of Cuba’, ‘Return to Cuba’ and ‘Shadow and Sunlight in Cuba’ (R).
YVONNE CLOETTA (born c. 1930). A married Frenchwoman who became Greene’s lover (his ‘Happy, Healthy Kitten’) during the last thirty years of his life, particularly during his residence at Antibes. Travels with My Aunt is dedicated to ‘H. H. K.’. He wrote J’Accuse in defence of her daughter, Martine.
CLAUD COCKBURN (1904–88). Friend of Greene’s at Berkhamsted and Oxford. The two men went begging, disguised as organ-grinders, and later visited the Rhineland. See Greene’s ‘Barrel-organing’ (R) and A Sort of Life, pp. 136–41. Cockburn became a communist, worked for the Spanish Republicans’ counter-espionage agency, edited The Week (1933–46), was a correspondent for the Daily Worker (1935–46) and a contributor to the New Statesman. He also gained fame as a humorous writer for Punch and Private Eye.
JOSEPH CONRAD (1857–1924). Polish-born seaman who, having settled in England, became an acclaimed writer of novels, tales and essays (though he was less successful as a playwright). Greene greatly admired and frequently cited him, though he felt that some Conradian works (particularly The Arrow of Gold) had influenced adversely his own earliest writings. It’s a Battlefield is extensively indebted to The Secret Agent. Like Conrad, Greene took popular forms of fiction and gave them new subtlety and intensity. See ‘Congo Journal’ (IS); Ways of Escape, Chap 1; ‘Remembering Mr. Jones’ and ‘The Domestic Background’ (Collected Essays);and the citations in Reflections. In 1937, echoing Conrad’s ‘A Familiar Preface’, Greene wrote (R, p. 67): ‘The poetic cinema. … can be built up on a few very simple ideas, as simple as the ideas behind the poetic fictions of Conrad: the love of peace, of country, a feeling for fidelity …..’
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM (1852–1936). Aristocratic Scottish traveller, adventurer, pioneer socialist and Scottish Nationalist; author of numerous tales, essays, biographies and histories. Greene met him in 1929 and 1933; both men were published by Heinemann. In Reflections, Greene recalls Cunninghame Graham’s A Vanished Arcadia, which deals sympathetically with the Jesuit missions in Paraguay (claiming that they represented a primitive form of communism). The whisky-priest of The Power and the Glory may be a relative of the tobacco-priest in Cunninghame Graham’s tale ‘A Jesuit’. His sympathy with the underdog led Cunninghame Graham not only to vigorous championship of left-wing and nationalist causes but also to defend some activities of Roman Catholics. His adventurous life has various affinities with Greene’s.
J. W. DUNNE (1875–1949). Aircraft designer and author of the widely read An Experiment with Time (1927) and The Serial Universe (1934). His theories of precognitive dreams and temporal overlaps influenced various writers, notably John Buchan and J. B. Priestley. Greene endorsed Dunne’s ideas and was encouraged by them not only to note his own apparently precognitive experiences but also to incorporate prophetic dreams in his novels. The Bear Fell Free is strongly influenced by the theory of serial time.
T. S. ELIOT (1888–1965). His poems considerably influenced Greene’s writings: The Waste Land showed how glimpses of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory might intersect a debased modern world; ‘The Hollow Men’ provided an apt epigraph to The Name of Action; and the essay ‘Baudelaire’ epitomised some of Greene’s most paradoxical preoccupations. (The novelist met Eliot several times.)
FORD MADOX FORD (previously Ford Madox Hueffer; 1873–1939). A Roman Catholic, he collaborated wtih Conrad on The Inheritors and Romance. His own novels, particularly The Good Soldier, were highly regarded by Greene, who arranged for Bodley Head to reprint a series of them. The essay ‘Ford Madox Ford’ is a warmly appreciative review of the man and his works: Greene said that Ford was ‘the best literary editor England has ever had’. Ford praised It’s a Battlefield at a time when Greene needed encouragement.
DOROTHY GLOVER (pen-names ‘Dorothy Craigie’ and ‘David Craigie.’; 1901–71). Greene’s lover from the late 1930s until the mid-1940s; in letters he referred to her as ‘M. G.’ (‘My Girl’). She illustrated his four books for children, and with him she amassed the collection catalogued as Victorian Detective Fiction (1966). During the Blitz, she worked as a fire-warden alongside Greene (see WE, Chap. 4) and he shared her flat at Gower Mews, which features in The Confidential Agent.
BARBARA GREENE (later Countess Strachwitz; 1907–91). A cousin of Graham Greene’s who accompanied him on the arduous tour of Liberia in 1935, described in her book Land Benighted (1938).
CHARLES HENRY GREENE (1865–1942). Graham’s father. He joined Berkhamsted School as assistant master in 1889, became second master in 1896 and was headmaster from 1910 to 1927, after which he retired to Crowborough. He married Marion Raymond (a cousin), daughter of the Reverend Carleton Greene, in 1895. See The Old School, final chapter, and A Sort of Life, Chaps 1–3.
ELISABETH GREENE (later Elisabeth Dennys; born 1914). Graham’s younger sister. She joined the Secret Intelligence Service and married a colleague, Rodney Dennys, who held various important posts in that service. In 1941 she recruited Graham as a full-time agent; he officially left MI6 in 1944, after gaining experience to be used in The Heart of the Matter, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor.
HERBERT GREENE (1892-C.1960). Graham’s oldest brother, ‘the black sheep of the family.’; engaged in espionage, was unsuccessful in various jobs, and became an alcoholic. A source of the ‘Anthony Farrant’ type of character in Graham Greene’s novels.
SIR HUGH CARLETON GREENE (1910–87). Graham’s younger brother. A journalist in the 1930s, he eventually became Director-General of the BBC. From 1971 to 1978 he was also Chairman of Greene, King and Sons, brewers of the excellent Abbot Ale; and, at the publishers The Bodley Head, he was Chairman from 1969 to 1981 and Honorary President from 1981 to 1987. He co-edited with Graham The Spy’s Bedside Book (1957) and Victorian Villainies (1984).
SIR WILLIAM GRAHAM GREENE (1857–1950). Graham’s uncle. He served the Admiralty for thirty-six years (being Permanent Secretary from 1911 to 1917) and helped to establish the Naval Intelligence service. His home was Harston House in Cambridgeshire, a location used repeatedly in Greene’s novels and tales, notably The Ministry of Fear and ‘Under the Garden’ (a tale in which Sir William’s gardener, Ernest Northrop, makes a brief appearance).
VIVIEN GREENE (Vivienne Dayrell-Browning; born 1904). She was a Roman Catholic convert, a fact which led Graham Greene to conversion before he married her in 1927. They had two children. Long afterwards, she remarked: ‘I had the hard part when we were young and poor. All the mistresses had the good times.’ In 1995 The Times described her as ‘the world’s leading dolls’ house expert’: her collection is housed in the Rotunda Museum at Oxford.
SIR HENRY RIDER HAGGARD (1856–1925). Author of romantic adventure-novels: notably King Solomon’s Mines (1885), which Jim in The Captain and the Enemy has read four times, and Allan Quatermain (1887), which Greene associated with ‘The Third Man’. Greene retained his early enthusiasm for Haggard’s work, and reflected that his own travels in Africa might have been prompted by King Solomon’s Mines. (See ‘The Lost Childhood’ and ‘Rider Haggard’s Secret’ in CE.)
HENRY JAMES (1843–1916). Dedicated and subtle American-born fiction-writer who settled in England and became a British subject in 1915. Greene argued that religious values pervade his work. ‘Hell and Purgatory: James came very close to a direct statement of his belief in both of these.’ James’s The Turn of the Screw probably influenced ‘The Basement Room’. The Wings of the Dove tinged Greene’s love for Catherine Walston: he called her ‘Kate Croy’. Numerous pieces in Collected Essays discuss James; see also ‘The Young Henry James’ in Reflections.
BENJAMIN JOWETT (1817–93). Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Greene’s radio play The Great Jowett (1939, published 1981) commends him for introducing liberal reforms (he makes Balliol ‘a college where a poor man could be happy’) and for founding the University’s Drama Society and Indian Institute.
SIR ALEXANDER KORDA (1893–1956). Hungarian-born movie mogul; head of London Films (which served as a cover for British espionage abroad). Greene, as film critic, repeatedly sniped at him; but Korda befriended Greene, employed him as a script-writer, and took him on voyages in the yacht Elsewhere. Korda was the original of Herbert Dreuther in Loser Takes All, and, said Greene, ‘even provided me with the plot’. Ways of Escape (Chap. 7) includes an affectionate tribute to ‘Alex, a man whom I loved’.
FRANÇOIS MAURIAC (1885–1970). French Catholic novelist, story-writer, dramatist and critic, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1952. When praising his works (in the essay ‘François Mauriac’), Greene says that the actions of his characters ‘are less important than the force, whether God or Devil, that compels them.’; and he quotes with approval passages containing the following aphorisms: ‘The patience of vice is infinite.’; ‘God is the good temptation to which many men finally succumb’ (CE, pp. 119, 120). See also the comments in CCE, pp. 160–1.
CHARLES PÉGUY (1875–1914). French poet, essaysist and heterodox Catholic. His essay ‘Un nouveau théologien, M. Fernand Laudet’ (1911) provided the epigraph of The Heart of the Matter. Impressed by the life of Villon, Péguy alleged that the experts on Christianity are the sinner and the saint: indeed, basically they are the same: ‘en principe c’est le même homme’.
J. B. PRIESTLEY (1894–1984). Prolific and popular author of novels (notably The Good Companions, 1929, and Angel Pavement, 1930) and plays (notably An Inspector Calls, 1947). Greene, in several novels, made sniping references to him; Priestley threatened a libel action for his portrayal as Savory in Stamboul Train. Priestley’s wartime broadcasts helped to sustain national morale, and in ‘A Lost Leader’ (1940) Greene extolled him as ‘a great man’, ‘second only in importance to Mr. Churchill’. Priestley became a director of The Bodley Head in 1957, Greene in 1958; each rented a flat in Albany.
SIR HERBERT READ (1893–1968). Poet, critic, novelist and autobiographer, recalled affectionately by Greene (WE, pp. 39–44): ‘T. S. Eliot and Herbert Read were the two great figures of my young manhood.’ As a literary critic for Night and Day, Read worked alongside Greene, who said that he would put his sole novel, The Green Child (1935), ‘among the great poems of this century’.
SIR CAROL REED (1906–76). English film director whose films include The Stars Look Down (1939), Odd Man Out (1946), An Outcast of the Islands (1951) and three based on Greene’s works: The Fallen Idol (1948), The Third Man (1949) and Our Man in Havana (1959). Of these, The Fallen Idol is excellent, The Third Man outstanding, and Our Man in Havana disappointing.
JOCELYN RICKARDS (born 1924). Australian-born painter and theatrical designer. In the 1950s, Greene was one of her lovers; others included A. J. Ayer, the philosopher, and John Osborne, the dramatist.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616). His writings pervasively influenced Greene’s: for example, the title of The Name of Action quotes Hamlet, and so does Prewitt in Brighton Rock. The Name of Action sometimes recalls Measure for Measure, and Pericles provides thematic and comic material for England Made Me. In British Dramatists, Greene praises Shakespeare’s precision; but in ‘The Virtue of Disloyalty’ (R) he complains that though Shakespeare is ‘the greatest of all poets’, he is the ‘one supreme poet of conservatism’.
GENERAL OMAR TORRIJOS (Omar Torrijos Herrera; 1929–81). Seized power in Panama by means of a military coup in 1968, and curtailed civil liberties (some opponents were tortured and killed). He instituted various social reforms, and was flattered by Greene in Getting to Know the General. Torrijos died in a plane crash, which may have suggested the ending of The Captain and the Enemy.
CATHERINE WALSTON (later Lady Walston; 1916–78). Wife of Henry (later Lord) Walston, the wealthy landowner. She was beautiful, vivacious and sexually bold. Evelyn Waugh’s Diaries (1976, p. 702) described her thus in 1948: ‘Fine big eyes and mouth, unaffected to the verge of insanity, unvain, no ostentation – simple friendliness and generosity and childish curiosity ….. Her bedside littered with books of devotion.’ Greene, her godfather when she became a Catholic convert, was one of her lovers between 1946 and the early 1960s; he hoped to marry her. His collection of poems, After Two Years, was privately printed for Catherine, and his relationship with her provides the basis of The End of the Affair. The American edition of that novel is dedicated ‘To Catherine with love.’; the British and American editions of The Living Room are dedicated (slightly more emphatically) ‘To Catherine with Love’.
EVELYN WAUGH (1903–66). Catholic convert (1930) and novelist acclaimed for the satiric works Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). He also wrote biographies of Edmund Campion and Ronald Knox. A friend and correspondent of Greene’s, he nevertheless criticised the theology of The Heart of the Matter and declined to review A Burnt-Out Case. His Diaries (1976, p. 779) say of the latter novel: ‘It is the first time Graham has come out as specifically faithless – pray God it is a mood, but it strikes deeper and colder …. What is more – no, less – Graham’s skill is fading.’
MALCOLM WILLIAMSON (born 1931). Australian composer who converted Greene’s Our Man in Havana into an opera (1963) which Greene enjoyed: ‘[S]ome people were very unkind to it, quite wrongly I thought. It had some good tunes – must have had if I enjoyed it.’ (Sunday Times, 5 March 1978, p. 37.)